In Kindertoten (Songs of Dead Children, 1904), Gustav Mahler designed the face of modern vocal music. Imbued with inconsolable grief, the five-part score for voice and orchestra offers a fundamentally new interpretation of the genre of the vocal cycle – in Mahler it becomes more complex to the scale of a confessional statement with dramaturgy subordinated to the end-to-end symphonic development. Freely handling the texts of the German poet Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866), the composer completes and rebuilds the poetic form, following exclusively musical logic.

The figure of the lyrical hero is cleared of individual, specific features, of flesh and character: Mahler strives for the image of “man in general”, for the identification of his existential essence. Kindertoten transforms the concert stage into the stage of a vocal-instrumental theatre, devoid of external action, but with its dramatic expressiveness close to the mono-opera genre.

In 1983 Reinbert de Leeuw made a version for a chamber orchestra.